INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: Orbit Logic
Alexander F. Herz
President and Chief
Executive Officer
Orbit Logic
Alexander F. Herz is a co-founder of Orbit Logic and is its current president and chief executive officer. He has a degree in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University (1989) and has worked at Space Shuttle Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and for EER on the COMET program. In addition, he was the ground system and operations manager for NASA’s VCL and SWIFT missions while working as a director at Omitron. Herz left Omitron in early 2000 to start Orbit Logic.
Q: Can you tell us about Orbit Logic and the products and services it offers to military and intelligence customers?
A: Orbit Logic offers a suite of mission planning and scheduling software products for space and ground systems. We also provide engineering services to integrate and extend these tools, or develop custom solutions where necessary to meet mission unique requirements. We started the company to help customers take full advantage of available COTS software, hardware and services for satellite ground systems. We could not find a good COTS scheduling utility, so we ended up filling in that gap with custom software developed in-house at Orbit Logic. A few years later, we find ourselves as a scheduling software specialist offering COTS scheduling software and related services. Scheduling software products and services for satellite ground systems is our sole business focus right now, and it is keeping us busy and growing.
Q: What unique benefits does your company offer customers?
A: Our software products reduce or eliminate software development for the mission planning, collection planning and scheduling components of ground segment systems. Reduced software development means less risk, lower costs, shorter deployment schedules, more stable software, and in most cases greater capability. It is the basic COTS proposition. Why reinvent the wheel?
Q: Don’t most missions have unique planning requirements? How can COTS software be used?
A: Everyone starts out thinking that their planning requirements are unique. In fact, we started out developing custom planning software solutions for our customers. What we realized was that we were applying the same basic architecture to each problem, and that a COTS product with flexible configuration for constraints could be applied across a wide range of missions and mission types. That is what led to the development of STK/Scheduler, and eventually to our latest COTS products, Collection Planning & Analysis Workstation (CPAW) and Collection Planning Manager (CPM). We have deployed about 115 licenses of STK/Scheduler so far on a wide variety of missions, so the “unique requirements” argument against COTS does not really hold up.
Q: Why did you develop the Collection Planning and Analysis Workstation, and what can it do?
A: CPAW is our COTS software product for agile imaging satellite collection planning. It is essentially a high fidelity spacecraft simulator coupled with our advanced planning algorithms. CPAW generates optimized imaging plans for any specified planning period, usually somewhere between 1 and 3 orbits. One nice thing about CPAW is that multiple spacecraft models can be integrated, allowing an operator to generate plans for multiple spacecraft on a single workstation. And it is very user friendly. While the computations going on behind the scenes are complex, the user needs to only click five or six buttons to create and visualize a plan. The GUIs also allow an operator to edit the plan if desired. A cluster of CPAW workstations supports parallel processing and even better optimization.
Q: What are some examples of the benefits experienced by your customers?
A: DigitalGlobe and GeoEye both use planning software developed by Orbit Logic for imaging satellite mission planning and collection planning. Our software has reduced their collection planning timelines, helped maximize the value of imagery collected and automated their planning operations leading to reduced manpower and costs. For most of our STK/Scheduler customers, the biggest benefit is a reduction in the time and effort required to generate and modify schedules for their missions. STK/Scheduler can be configured to perform mission-unique scheduling within hours, right out of the box. Schedule updates take minutes or seconds instead or hours or days.
Q: What areas are you working on for the future in meeting military and intelligence needs?
A: We are in the process of applying our planning and scheduling software technology to a new software product for UAV and manned aircraft reconnaissance planning and close air support planning. Our existing STK/Scheduler product has been used for this in the past, but the new product will provide more extensive automated route planning capabilities, high fidelity aircraft modeling, and a clustered computing architecture for optimized plans and a far better solution. We expect to release a beta version of this new Air Support MPS product in early 2008. ♦
